How Metropolitan Are Federal and State Policies?

Abstract

IKE THE weather, everybody talks about the need for restructuring local government in metropolitan areas but nobody does anything about it. In the words of Thomas Reed, So far we have accomplished little more than the world's record for words in proportion to cures effected. 1 The problems are real enough: uneven allocation of fiscal resources among the many local governments in a metropolitan area, disparities in levels of service among central city and suburban jurisdictions, economically inefficient scale of operation, excessive spillover of costs and benefits, and unresolved areawide problems. Heavy emphasis in the extensive literature to date has been on the use of intra-metropolitan machinery-annexation, extraterritorial powers, interlocal contracting, councils of governments, urban counties, control of special districts, and city-county consolidations, etc. 2 Less attention has been given to the vertical (Federal-State-local, Federallocal, State-local) dimension in which all governments in metropolitan areas must also operate; yet both the horizontal and the vertical systems of intergovernmental relationships should be understood before crea-